superficial engagement Quotes

There's a certain fast-food approach to the whole music thing that's changed the role it plays for us all. You are doing it while you are doing other things. Not that that is new - people have had music on in the background as long as there has been music.

... It was the idea of facing a future skimming the surface of life, winging my way in and out of other people's crises, confusions, and passages, engaging them enough to get the story, but never enough to be indelibly touched by what I had seen or heard.

Some people come to Old Trafford and can't spell football, let alone understand it. They have a few drinks and a prawn sandwich but don't realise what's happening on the pitch

No, I don't read the papers. I just look at the pictures.

And so the liberal tendency became a habit with Stepan Arkadyich, and he liked his newspaper, as he liked a cigar after dinner, for the slight haze it produced in his head.

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.

Rather than really have, like a close relationship to anything that's coming out today, people are just, they've got it on as background music. It's kind of the same way the cabdrivers use music; it's very disposable.

Being outraged about two men or two women, it requires absolutely no work on the ground. So you can be outraged and you can be an armchair activist, engage in nothing and just simply get on the microphone and say, "I don't believe in X, Y, and Z, and it's terrible," and you can call them names.

The people that only listen to one song from a record and flip around that much, if that's the only way they listen to music, they're probably the kind of people that like music as something to drive to, you know?

Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.

The very quality of books to read and facts to master with which the twentieth-century man is confronted encourages him to think broadly and superficially about much, but hinders him from thinking deeply and thoroughly about anything.

The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' - we fly in, scratch around and fly out.

I am interested in a hundred things, but only slightly.

The manner in which Americans ''consume'' music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Hence, in all countries the chief occupation of society is card-playing, and it is the gauge of its value, and an outward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.

This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.

We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.

Just as someone who's been interested in radio and programming for so long, I can usually tell when an interviewer is doing a segment just to fill a programming slot. They ask questions, but they don't care about the answers.

For my part, I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out one's acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage. One merely comes to meet one's friends, and show that one's alive.

One of the biggest problems with the Internet: people thinking they know something or are participating in or experiencing something when they aren't. Or, how people think they are staying in touch with their friends by "liking" their pictures.

Yes, there's something dangerous about turning people into token social activists. I was thinking about this recently with our pop-culture feminism, when feminism is such a buzzword in the media now. We're covering it in a way that we haven't before, but also in a way that's way more surface level. And while I think that there's some danger in that, I also think it's a great gateway for some people.